


Night Is When We Slake Our Thirst (Expanded)

by jujubiest



Category: Dracula 2000 (Movies)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Doomed Relationship, Dracula II Ascension, Dracula III Legacy, F/M, Forbidden Love, M/M, The Author Regrets Nothing, Vampire Hunters, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-09
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-29 00:35:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13915608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jujubiest/pseuds/jujubiest
Summary: After Elizabeth disappears, Luke decides to accompany Father Uffizi on his journey in hopes of somehow saving her. But the more time passes, the more he loses hope that he will ever find her. And the more time he spends with Father Uffizi, the more he realizes that Elizabeth isn't the only person he cares about in need of saving.Meanwhile, Elizabeth finds herself in the blood-drenched halls of Dracula himself, surrounded by darkness and depravity, clinging to the last shreds of her humanity and praying for death.What remains to be seen is whether Luke will be the answer to those prayers, or find some way to save both of the people that he loves.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> An expansion of [this piece](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5612323).

When Luke had looked around at the blood-splattered debris which was all that was left of his life, the choice had seemed so simple. It wasn’t as though he could just pick up the pieces and move on, not knowing the things he did. He would never feel safe walking alone at night again. He would never invite a strange girl into his apartment again, either, not without flicking a fistful of holy water in her direction first. And he’d never work another day in the morgue without wondering if the next body they brought in might be another half-charred vampire. 

Then, of course, there was Elizabeth, split in his mind’s eye like a double-exposed photograph: the girl he had known, calm green eyes and sardonic grin; and the creature she had become, shrinking in the shadows, pale skin run through with blackened veins and eyes so bright they almost glowed with a sickly light of their own. She’d run, believing she couldn’t be saved...and determined to save him instead.

But she couldn’t save him from what he knew, or the dreadful sense of purpose that settled on him once he knew it. So when the priest half-grinned and said “I could use someone like you,” Luke took what was on offer with no hesitation.

He would second-guess that decision countless times over the next five years. When he was fighting for his life in the darkness of fetid alleyways. When he woke in the pre-dawn hours to the sound of the priest’s agonized screaming. When he slept, and dreamed of Elizabeth in a blood-soaked hell.

It was the last that kept him from turning and running back to the illusions of safety and normalcy. Somewhere, Elizabeth waited in the darkness. It was his fault she had ended up there.

So it was up to him to save her.


	2. Sympathetic Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke and Uffizi track down a lead on Dracula's whereabouts in Atlanta. Luke learns an important lesson.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you came to this from the original, short/truncated version of the story, I really hope you enjoy this version! Thanks so much for reading.

It was an unseasonably cold April for Atlanta, and unusually humid. The latter part of the summer was known for its heavy air, but springtime was typically warm, bright, and clear. Not so this year; the air hung low and heavy over the gray roads and floated between the glass buildings. Tendrils of cold moisture slithered beneath the collars of the few late-night pedestrians, clinging stickily to the bare skin under t-shirts, suits, jackets, dresses.

Luke tried unsuccessfully to shrug off the sensation of tiny legs crawling down his spine. He had always hated southern cities for precisely this reason. New Orleans, at least, had been near water, somewhat tempering the tendency for the air to turn to tepid soup. Atlanta, on the other hand, was a sweltering, land-locked hell even when it wasn’t warm out. Unfortunately, it also seemed to be a hotbed of vampiric activity, and the likeliest source of their next lead.

That didn’t make Luke feel any better about being bait. Father Uffizi—Luke’s very own Master Yoda in a cassock and a Roman collar—had assured him drily that he was in no real danger. But he’d smiled when he said it, which the good father almost never did. And worrying about what Uffizi could have found so amusing didn’t do much to boost Luke’s confidence in this plan.

Nor did the fact that it required him to cut his own palm and bleed all over the surrounding area.

“In for a penny,” Luke muttered, pulling out the dagger Uffizi had given him and dragging it across his palm with a pained hiss. He wiped the dagger on his jeans and re-sheathed it awkwardly, then held his palm out and open as he walked, allowing the blood to drip onto the damp pavement from one end of the alley to the other. The cut, which had stung at first, went quickly and blessedly numb. The body’s defense mechanism, he knew. A mild form of shock serving as a local anesthetic. It wouldn’t last long, but it would hopefully last long enough to get this done.

By the time he’d walked the full length of the alley once, the blood had slowed to a sporadic drip. He held the hand up to the dim glow of the street lamp which barely filtered into the alley’s shadows at one end. The laceration wasn’t very deep; his first year of med school had desensitized him to the sight of blood, and a couple of semesters of working in the morgue had given him far too much insight into the various types of trauma the human body can be subjected to. The knife had been sharp, and not serrated. The edges of the cut were clean, the skin not puffing up or bruising. Some peroxide, first aid ointment, and bandages, and he would be good as new in a week or two.

From the shadows at his back, a low, feral sound ripped its way down the alley.

_That is, if I survive Master Yoda’s harebrained training program._

Luke very carefully did not react, though it took everything in him to fight the prey animal instincts telling him to run for his life. He brought his arm down slowly, keeping the hand open so that the smell of fresh blood would stay strong in the target’s nose. Most vampires, Uffizi had taught him, fell into a frenzy at the smell of fresh blood. It shredded their focus, clouded their instincts. It made them vastly more dangerous, but also much easier to subdue and kill.

He took a deep, slow breath, trying to listen over his heartbeat pounding in his ears. The predator behind him moved like a shadow, bounced from one end of the alley to another as though by a simple shift of light. One moment it was several yards away. The next, Luke could feel its cool breath on his neck. The urge to run fled, his insides seeming to turn to ice water. He couldn’t have moved if he’d tried. The vampire could no doubt smell his fear; it pressed its face into his neck and inhaled, chuckling wetly against the exposed skin.

 _Come on,_ he thought desperately.  _Come on, Uffizi. Where the fuck are you?_

Then, just when Luke was certain his time was up, the vampire was gone with a wail and a crash.

The ice in Luke’s limbs melted and he spun around, pressing himself flat to the wall of one of the two buildings. The hard, rough surface stung against his injured hand, but he didn’t care. If he leaned away even a little he was sure he would fall over.

Uffizi, meanwhile, was as unflappable and ruthlessly competent as ever. His movements were deliberate and steady as he hauled the vampire to its feet and slammed it against the other wall, holding it there with one hand while the other clutched a wooden stake. The heels of its boots scrambled for purchase several inches off the ground, and it clawed helplessly at the abnormally strong human that held it, eyes looking past Uffizi's stern face to seek out Luke in the shadows.

Uffizi was speaking to it, demanding the information they’d come here for in a voice clipped short with furious impatience. Luke barely comprehended the priest's words or noticed whether the vampire said anything coherent back; he was too busy taking in the creature itself.

It—she—looked very much like a terrified human woman. Aside, of course, from the bared fangs and the bright-glowing eyes. Even with that, though, she could have been just some goth chick on her way to a costume party. Her face made her seem young, even younger than him, a college undergrad maybe. She could have been hundreds of years old for all he knew, but she had clearly been turned when she was barely out of her awkward teen years. He thought he spied a dusting of freckles across her pale, snub-nosed face, and it was all too easy to imagine her with braces.

He thought he might be sick.

“Hey,” he barked hoarsely, seeing Uffizi's fingers tighten around the stake. “Stop. Uffizi, let her go. She doesn’t know anything.” Uffizi’s face was already twisted with the righteous rage of his mission, a vein in his neck starting to throb tellingly. He was going to kill this girl, this kid who had never even gotten a chance to have a real life. And Luke couldn’t just watch it happen.

For a moment he thought Uffizi wasn’t going to listen to him. He just stared into the girl’s pale, frightened face for several long seconds. Then he dropped her to the ground and turned toward Luke, eyes hard but resigned. He gestured toward the main street, indicating that they should go. Luke hesitated, then peeled himself from the wall and followed Uffizi to the mouth of the alley, already thinking of antiseptic, painkillers, and sleep.

The slight scrabble of boots on pavement was his only warning. Luke turned and stared with wide-eyed horror at the vampire bearing down on him, fangs bared and eyes wild with hunger. He staggered back, panicked, tripping over his own feet and falling hard onto the sidewalk. The pain was distant, unimportant in the face of the swiftly-advancing, bloody death that no longer looked remotely like a human girl. He threw up his hands and closed his eyes, his throat too constricted with fear to even shout.

A sick sound, like a pair of scissors closing on a slab of raw meat, and a splash of warmth across his face…then nothing. No sharp points of pain at his carotid, no cool breath smelling of decayed corpses on his face. Shaking, practically hyperventilating, but alive, Luke opened his eyes.

The girl was gone, reduced to a heap of dust on the damp pavement in front of him. He reached up and felt the sticky warmth on his face, the realization that this was her blood coming to him, slowly and most unwelcome. He scrubbed at his face with his hands, desperately, squeezing his eyes and mouth shut again as he did so. All it took, he knew, was a single drop. Once it infected you, the only option was to burn it out in the sun and hope there was enough human left in you to survive.

Strong hands grasped his wrists, dragged his hands away from where they clawed at his face. A hard voice commanded him to open his eyes.

He opened them slowly to see Uffizi, a look of deep concern etched across his normally stoic face. It was gone as soon as he registered Luke’s eyes looking into his own, replaced with the familiar expression of perpetual fury and disdain with which Luke was familiar. Uffizi pulled Luke roughly to his feet, his fingers seemingly finding every scrape and bruise as he did so. Luke grit his teeth against the pain and steadied himself with his unhurt hand against the wall. He supposed he didn’t deserve any coddling.

“Never forget that they are not human,” Uffizi said, his voice deceptively soft and gentle. “Human mercies are wasted upon the undead. They will not return the courtesy. They will only see it as proof of your weakness, and use it against you.”

Luke only nodded, not trusting himself to say anything remotely helpful. He lived in daily fear that he would die before he got to Elizabeth, but also that Uffizi would decide he was more trouble than he was worth and simply leave him behind. He knew he would never find her on his own. And he knew that, on some level, tonight he had failed. He stared down at his scuffed tennis shoes, morose.

Uffizi reached for him with a sigh, and Luke's head snapped up, his whole body tensing. But the priest merely took up his now-throbbing hand, surprisingly gently, and turned it over, lifting it slightly to examine the palm in the dim glow of the streetlights. The once clean, straight cut was now scraped, torn open wider, and bleeding freely again. The surrounding skin was an angry, ugly red and Luke was pretty sure there was dirt and gravel in the wound. He grimaced.

"Come on," Father Uffizi said with an air of long-suffering to his voice. "Let's clean this before it gets infected. I do keep telling you not to use the palm."

He released Luke, turned, and began to walk back in the general direction of their care, and Luke followed, now cradling his mangled hand carefully.

"Yeah yeah, too many nerves in the palm, too incapacitating, use the arm, yada yada. Listen, I'm not accidentally slicing open a major artery to save myself a little pain, alright? No thank you."

Uffizi only grunted; it was an old argument already, though they'd only been traveling together for a few weeks.

It was only after they had trudged back to their car and driven several hours outside the city in complete silence that Luke realized Uffizi had gotten no useful information from the vampire girl. Another dead end in their thus-far fruitless search, nothing to show for the night’s work but yet one more lesson Luke had learned the hard way.

A small part of him wondered if that had been the entire point.

* * *

 

Later, in the early morning hours when they finally stopped for sleep, Luke found himself unable to close his eyes. He kept seeing the girl, feral monster and frightened child. He could see now, of course, that there was nothing human about her; it had all been a ruse for his benefit. She knew how to put on the mask when it suited her. And she had pegged him as the weak link in five seconds flat.

“It was different,” Luke said into the silence of the car. He knew Uffizi was still awake. The priest never fell asleep before he did; it was almost as though he couldn’t relax until he knew he was the only conscious person nearby.

“With Dracula, I mean,” he elaborated when Uffizi said nothing. “It was different. He was so obviously…”

“A monster?” Uffizi supplied. “Uncanny? Unnatural?”

“Yeah. Yeah, all of that."

“The thing we killed tonight was just as unnatural as Dracula, Luke. You must remember that. Once the taint has entered the blood, there is only one way to remove it.”

He did not say Elizabeth’s name. He didn’t have to. Luke was grateful for that. He didn’t think he had it in him tonight to argue, once again, the validity of his quest to save Elizabeth. They had argued about it before, briefly, and he was sure they would argue about it again. Someday Luke might even have to face the fact that Uffizi was right, and that Elizabeth was beyond saving. But some stubborn, childlike part of him refused to let hope die just yet.

“I won’t make the same mistake again,” Luke said, and meant it. He would do everything to save Elizabeth when the time came, but until then he would have to learn Uffizi's ruthlessness. The next time he was faced with a vampire, he promised himself, he wouldn’t hesitate. No matter how sympathetic a face the monster was wearing.


End file.
